Samuel Butler |Author |Born 1835 in UK

Mini biography from Queers in History

Samuel
Butler was a rebellious and innovative writer whose works proved to be far
ahead of their time. Educated at Cambridge to be a clergyman, he ran
away to the south island of New Zealand, where he lived the life of a
shepherd for five years. He then returned to England and tried his
hand at writing. His first book, Erewhon, a political fantasy
about a country where customs are the opposite of those typical of Western
culture, was an immediate success and is widely read today. The
Authoress of the Odyssey presents the gender-bending theory that
Homer’s Odyssey
was actually written by a woman. The Way of All Flesh,
Butler’s final novel, is a stark depiction of middle-class English life.

By the mid-1870s, Butler had a companion, Henry Festing
Jones (1851–1928), who gave up his law practice to devote himself to Butler.
The two men traveled the world together, at one point “adopting” a Swiss boy
named Hans. Jones later wrote a biography of Butler, who died in 1902,
which includes several discreet references to Butler’s homosexuality.